This just further drives home the point that people are just looking for instant ease of use, I've found myself that Gentoo has actually been the easiest distribution for servers once you're used to portage and all that, but Ubuntu and the likes are only going to get more and more popular at this rate.

More and more tutorials and such on forums, blogs etc are made for Ubuntu / Debian deriatives / Distro's with apt-get so naturally more people are going to use or switch to them.

This just further drives home the point that people are just looking for instant ease of use, I've found myself that Gentoo has actually been the easiest distribution for servers once you're used to portage and all that, but Ubuntu and the likes are only going to get more and more popular at this rate.

More and more tutorials and such on forums, blogs etc are made for Ubuntu / Debian deriatives / Distro's with apt-get so naturally more people are going to use or switch to them.

This. Also, people choose Ubuntu because they're more likely to be familiar with it from trying it on their home computer. Also, with Gentoo declining on servers...Gentoo isn't brilliant for companies with MASSIVE amounts of servers (like hundreds) due to the fact that every Gentoo install may be different and you have to do a bit of hackery to make them all the same (like putting /etc/portage/ on a NFS share and mask everything newer than the current version for all installed packages and then change it when necessary.)

[sarcasm]yes its so hard to edit a few text files and run a few commands, but if you have it in a nice gui it makes all the difference[/sarcasm]_________________I know 43 ways to kill with a SKITTLE, so taste my rainbow bitch.

This just further drives home the point that people are just looking for instant ease of use, I've found myself that Gentoo has actually been the easiest distribution for servers once you're used to portage and all that, but Ubuntu and the likes are only going to get more and more popular at this rate.

More and more tutorials and such on forums, blogs etc are made for Ubuntu / Debian deriatives / Distro's with apt-get so naturally more people are going to use or switch to them.

This. Also, people choose Ubuntu because they're more likely to be familiar with it from trying it on their home computer. Also, with Gentoo declining on servers...Gentoo isn't brilliant for companies with MASSIVE amounts of servers (like hundreds) due to the fact that every Gentoo install may be different and you have to do a bit of hackery to make them all the same (like putting /etc/portage/ on a NFS share and mask everything newer than the current version for all installed packages and then change it when necessary.)

If you had a few hundred servers, you'd use be using BINHOST rather updating them individually, making /etc/portage pretty much irrelevant _________________“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

This just further drives home the point that people are just looking for instant ease of use, I've found myself that Gentoo has actually been the easiest distribution for servers once you're used to portage and all that, but Ubuntu and the likes are only going to get more and more popular at this rate.

More and more tutorials and such on forums, blogs etc are made for Ubuntu / Debian deriatives / Distro's with apt-get so naturally more people are going to use or switch to them.

I sort of disagree. Most server (except Microsoft ones maybe) are managed by professions; if that's not so, it will be the case in the future IMO.

Professionals don't see ease of use -- they see the maintenance, performance and security; in server environments, maintaining Gentoo is really not hard and we all know Gentoo is best at performance and security (hardened).

This just further drives home the point that people are just looking for instant ease of use, I've found myself that Gentoo has actually been the easiest distribution for servers once you're used to portage and all that, but Ubuntu and the likes are only going to get more and more popular at this rate.

More and more tutorials and such on forums, blogs etc are made for Ubuntu / Debian deriatives / Distro's with apt-get so naturally more people are going to use or switch to them.

This. Also, people choose Ubuntu because they're more likely to be familiar with it from trying it on their home computer. Also, with Gentoo declining on servers...Gentoo isn't brilliant for companies with MASSIVE amounts of servers (like hundreds) due to the fact that every Gentoo install may be different and you have to do a bit of hackery to make them all the same (like putting /etc/portage/ on a NFS share and mask everything newer than the current version for all installed packages and then change it when necessary.)

If you had a few hundred servers, you'd use be using BINHOST rather updating them individually, making /etc/portage pretty much irrelevant

Gentoo is horrible for servers, I cannot tell my customers to take down 24 servers for couple of hours so that gentoo can compile updates, when other distros can do it within 20 minutes time-frame or less. Why bother?

Gentoo is horrible for servers, I cannot tell my customers to take down 24 servers for couple of hours so that gentoo can compile updates, when other distros can do it within 20 minutes time-frame or less. Why bother?

24 hours? I don't think so dude. What kind of server are you talking about?

Also it's a good idea to make backup of the rootfs and compile the updates in a chroot env (or a different system), and building binary packages on the way; that way you can even test the updated installation.

Gentoo is horrible for servers, I cannot tell my customers to take down 24 servers for couple of hours so that gentoo can compile updates, when other distros can do it within 20 minutes time-frame or less. Why bother?

You can't take down 24 severs for 20 minutes either. So no difference here.

What speaks against Gentoo is that it's more difficult to find qualified employees and there is no official support from the distro itself.

Gentoo is horrible for servers, I cannot tell my customers to take down 24 servers for couple of hours so that gentoo can compile updates, when other distros can do it within 20 minutes time-frame or less. Why bother?

ever made a dist-upgrade in debian/ubuntu?

Last edited by dirkfanick on Tue Dec 20, 2011 4:56 pm; edited 1 time in total

Gentoo is horrible for servers, I cannot tell my customers to take down 24 servers for couple of hours so that gentoo can compile updates, when other distros can do it within 20 minutes time-frame or less. Why bother?

Gentoo is horrible for servers, I cannot tell my customers to take down 24 servers for couple of hours so that gentoo can compile updates, when other distros can do it within 20 minutes time-frame or less. Why bother?

See dE-logics' remark on BINHOST._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

Philosophy of a company to choose an operating system: "Who can we sue/blame if things break?"
As long as there's someone supporting the distro and takes the blame for breakage, they take anything.

Here I'm using gentoo and CentOS depending on if we need special binary packages that are only certified to run on some RPM distros. Why? Well... Just try to get eToken devices running with the official middleware from trustware on 64bit..._________________Blog | btrfs | Please stand by - The mailer daemon is busy burning your messages in hell...

I would be considered a hobby user, my profession as a carpenter does not require computer skills.
My first distro was sabayon and I quickly started using gentoo.

I see no reason for gentoo to be anywhere on distrowatch, any linux cd will work.

I have installed debian a few times, simply makes no sense to me .... gentoo is so much easier to accomplish what you want.
Every time I learn how to do something on debian, leaves me scratching my head .... seems so backwards. Compile a kernel for example.
Gentoo just seems to make sense to me.

I have little experience with servers, but would be gentoo all the way for me.